I have been offered a paying position in a computational chemistry lab where I would be modeling nonlinear systems and I have an offer for an unpaid internship in an investment advisory firm where I would be working on a stock valuation model. I am interested in getting into investment banking or preferably venture capital or private equity but I don't know which position would be better in terms of getting me to that goal.
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1) Do you need the money? 2) Are they both reputable companies?
I don't need the money in order to pay for school so the money is not essential. Williams College is where the chemistry lab is so the college is respected and the research group is academically respected. I don't know how to evaluate investment advisory firms but the management team has degrees from top 5 schools and have worked together for a long time, first in Greenwich and then in New York.
Investment advisory, its a no brainer
Sounds like you have already made your decision. I do not have any experience with computational chemistry but if you ever wanted to be an equity analyst or something of that nature it can be good to have industry specific knowledge.
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Do you go to Williams? I thought it was incredibly hard to be offered research there if you weren't part of the student/alum body.
The other important info you left out is what year you are. If you're a freshman or sophomore, this wouldn't be a bad move, but if you're a junior, you want to look for something as relevant to your ideal full-time role as possible. Taking a chemistry research position the year before you graduate wouldn't be too wise unless your network is so godly that you can pull something like a FT IBD offer later.
Do you really think spending a summer in a chemistry lab is going to be better for your prospects in finance than a summer spent in an actual finance position? If you think these two options are even remotely close you need to do more research into what most banks are looking for in their candidates.
I thought that working on advanced models would give me skills that could translate to finance. I thought that following a similar path to people like James Simons and Ed Thorp would be good prep for finance so I was considering chem research work.
Simons had a BA from MIT and a PhD from Berkley by the time he was 23 and Thorp was similarly gifted. Unless you are a math genius there is no way you can "follow their path". They both taught for years and were pretty well known in academia before they entered finance so I wouldn't be looking to them for career path guidance. If you are looking for skills that translate into finance why not take the finance job where you are guaranteed to pick up some of those skills?
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